Tablets are now available which provide an improved means for performing experiments or analyses using premeasured amounts of reagents. The tablets can be added to reaction chambers, containing, for example an analyte such as serum, and measurements taken without any metering of liquid reagents. Tablets are manufactured by the American Dade division of American Hospital Supply Corporation which can be employed in testing for a variety of analytes in serum. In one commercial application designed for hospital and clinical laboratory use, the tablets are used in a large scale analyzing system which employs a cuvette belt into which the tablets are dispensed. The dispensing apparatus for this system carries many tablets and has an elaborate mechanism enabling one tablet to be dispensed at a time.
The tablets may also be used, however, in a smaller scale environment, such as a doctor's office, where they are individually packaged. Such individual packaging is required in order to maintain freshness of the reagents where the time between analyses is much longer than for larger scale users such as hospitals and laboratories. There exists a need for a tablet dispenser which is able to dispense reagent tablets from a sealed package such that the tablet is not contaminated by manual handling, and so that the tablet can be easily released into a reaction chamber, such as a cuvette.